asta-skill

Domain expertise for Ai2 Asta MCP tools (Semantic Scholar corpus). Intent-to-tool routing, safe defaults, workflow patterns, and pitfall warnings for academic paper search, citation traversal, and author discovery.

install

source · Clone the upstream repo

git clone https://github.com/Agents365-ai/asta-skill

Claude Code · Install into ~/.claude/skills/

git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/Agents365-ai/asta-skill ~/.claude/skills/agents365-ai-asta-skill-asta-skill

manifest: SKILL.md

source content

Asta MCP — Academic Paper Search

Asta is Ai2's Scientific Corpus Tool, exposing the Semantic Scholar academic graph over MCP (streamable HTTP transport). This skill tells agents which Asta tool to call for which intent, and how to compose them into useful workflows.

MCP endpoint:
```
https://asta-tools.allen.ai/mcp/v1
```
Auth:
```
x-api-key
```
header (request key at https://share.hsforms.com/1L4hUh20oT3mu8iXJQMV77w3ioxm)
Transport: streamable HTTP

Update Notifications

<skill_directory>/.last_version_check

is missing or >24h old, fetch the

version

from

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Agents365-ai/asta-skill/main/SKILL.md

, compare to the local version, then write the current Unix timestamp to

.last_version_check

. If remote is newer, tell the user once:

📢 asta-skill X.Y.Z → A.B.C. Run 'git -C <skill_directory> pull' to update.

Silently skip on any failure. Never run

git pull

yourself.

Prerequisite Check

Before invoking any tool, verify the Asta MCP server is registered in the host agent. Tool names will be prefixed by the MCP server name chosen at install time (commonly

asta__<tool>

mcp__asta__<tool>

). If no Asta tools are visible, direct the user to the Installation section below.

Tool Map — Intent → Asta Tool

User intent	Asta tool	Notes
Broad topic search	`search_papers_by_relevance`	Supports venue + date filters
Known paper title	`search_paper_by_title`	Optional venue restriction
Known DOI / arXiv / PMID / CorpusId / MAG / ACL / SHA / URL	`get_paper`	Single-paper lookup
Multiple known IDs at once	`get_paper_batch`	Batch lookup — prefer over N sequential `get_paper` calls
Who cited paper X	`get_citations`	Citation traversal with filters, paginated
Find author by name	`search_authors_by_name`	Returns profile info
An author's publications	`get_author_papers`	Pass author id from previous call
Find passages mentioning X	`snippet_search`	~500-word excerpts from paper bodies

Search/citation tools accept

publication_date_range

(format

YYYY-MM-DD:YYYY-MM-DD

; year shorthand like

"2021:"

":2015-01"

"2015:2020"

is also accepted) and venues
(comma-separated) filters, plus fields
for field selection — pass them whenever the user's intent constrains scope (e.g., "recent", "since 2022", "at NeurIPS").

⚠️

fields

parameter — avoid context blowups

get_paper

get_paper_batch

accept a

fields

string. Never request
citations
or
references
via

fields

— a single highly-cited paper (e.g. Attention Is All You Need) returns 200k+ characters and will overflow the agent's context window. Use the dedicated

get_citations

tool for forward citations (it paginates). Asta does not provide a dedicated

get_references

tool — to retrieve a paper's reference list, use

get_paper

with

fields=references

only for papers you know have a small reference list (typically < 100).

Safe default

fields

for

get_paper

title,year,authors,venue,tldr,url,abstract

Add

journal

publicationDate

fieldsOfStudy

isOpenAccess

only when needed.

Workflow Patterns

Pattern 1 — Topic Discovery

```
search_papers_by_relevance(keyword, publication_date_range="<current_year-5>:", venues=?)
```
→ initial hits (compute the lower bound from today's date — e.g., in 2026 pass
```
publication_date_range="2021:"
```
; adjust or drop the filter if the user asks for older work)
Rank/present top N by citationCount + recency
Offer follow-ups:
```
get_citations
```
on the most influential, or
```
snippet_search
```
for specific claims

Pattern 2 — Seed-Paper Expansion

```
get_paper(DOI|arXiv|...)
```
→ verify seed
```
get_citations(paperId)
```
→ forward expansion
Optionally
```
search_papers_by_relevance
```
with seed title terms for sideways discovery
Deduplicate by paperId before presenting

Pattern 3 — Author Deep-Dive

```
search_authors_by_name(name)
```
→ pick correct profile (disambiguate by affiliation)
```
get_author_papers(authorId)
```
→ full publication list
Filter client-side by topic keywords or date

Pattern 4 — Evidence Retrieval

```
snippet_search(claim_query)
```
→ find passages making/supporting a claim
For each hit, optionally
```
get_paper(id)
```
for full metadata

Output & Interaction Rules

Always report total count and which tool was used.
Present top 10 as a table (title, year, venue, citations), then details for the most relevant.
If the user writes in Chinese, present summaries in Chinese; keep titles in original language.
After results, offer: Details / Refine / Citations / Snippet / Export / Done.

Critical Rules

Prefer batched intent over ping-pong. If the user's question needs two independent lookups, issue them as parallel MCP tool calls in one turn, not sequentially.
Never guess IDs. If a user gives a fuzzy title, use
```
search_paper_by_title
```
before
```
get_paper
```
.
Respect rate limits. An API key buys higher limits but not unlimited — stop expanding citation graphs beyond what the user asked for.
Do not fabricate fields. If Asta returns null
```
abstract
```
or
```
venue
```
, say so rather than inventing.

Handling Asta responses

Situation What to do

Empty

abstract

Not all corpus papers have full text — use

snippet_search

, or fall back to title + TLDR

Author disambiguation uncertain

Inspect affiliations in

search_authors_by_name

results before calling

get_author_papers

429 Too Many Requests

Back off; batch with

get_paper_batch

instead of sequential

get_paper

calls